Rapture’s Roadway

After the death of her father, Lonely Planet writer Virginia Jealous travels across the world to document the life of his obsession – the scandalous 20th century poet Laurence Hope – in a unique blend of memoir and travelogue. John Jealous was sixty, and poet Laurence Hope had already been dead for eighty years when he became incomprehensibly obsessed with her.   After his death, his daughter Virginia finds herself drawn into the extraordinary life and work of Laurence Hope – aka Violet Nicolson – who killed herself in Madras in 1904. Laurence Hope’s poetry, with its sexually adventurous themes, thrilled and scandalised the Empire in India and beyond. In the first years of the twentieth century she was the most famous poet in the world; by World War II she was forgotten.   Following in the footsteps of her father, Virginia travels across Australia, India, England, Spain and China, tracking Laurence Hope’s life, and finding answers to, and further mysteries in, her father’s unfinished business. A unique blend of poetry, memoir and travelogue, Rapture’s Roadway untangles truth and lies and, where that’s not possible, celebrates the enigma of not knowing.